Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 15 April 1945. What the British found there became the most-broadcast image of the Holocaust in Britain and shaped British public understanding of the camps for the rest of the twentieth century.
What was at Belsen
Belsen had not been an extermination camp in the Auschwitz sense. It had been a holding camp where prisoners evacuated from other camps were brought in the closing weeks of the war. By April 1945 it held around 60,000 prisoners in a complex built for around 10,000. Around 13,000 unburied bodies were lying in piles around the camp when the British arrived. A typhus epidemic was running unchecked. The water supply had been cut. There was almost no food.
The senior British officer was Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He took immediate command of the medical response. The SS personnel who had not fled were ordered to remain in the camp and to bury the dead by hand, in mass graves that the British dug with bulldozers. Films of SS guards loading bodies into the graves were taken by British Army Film and Photographic Unit teams and were broadcast widely in Britain and around the world.
The Dimbleby broadcast
The BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby reached Belsen on 19 April 1945. He recorded a fifteen-minute report that was broadcast on the BBC Home Service four days later, on 23 April. The BBC had at first refused to broadcast it, on the ground that the contents seemed too extreme to be true and that confirmation was needed. Dimbleby threatened to resign before the broadcast was authorised. The recording is one of the foundational documents of British Holocaust memory. It is still routinely played on Holocaust Memorial Day each January.
The aftermath
Around 14,000 prisoners died at Belsen in the weeks after liberation, of typhus, of dysentery and of the effects of long-term starvation. Despite the medical effort, the death rate in the first two weeks was around 500 per day. The British eventually moved the surviving prisoners to a German military barracks nearby, which became the displaced persons camp known as Belsen DP, and burned the original Belsen camp to the ground in May 1945 to control the typhus.
The Bergen-Belsen Trial, the first major war crimes trial of camp personnel, was held by the British at Lüneburg from September to November 1945. Forty-five defendants stood trial including the Belsen commandant Josef Kramer (transferred from Auschwitz a few months earlier) and the women guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath. Eleven were sentenced to death and hanged.
The operational record
The operational record on Bergen-Belsen and the British Response is documented in the surviving administrative records of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, in the postwar work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the subsidiary postwar museums and archives at the various camp sites, in the testimony recorded at the postwar judicial proceedings, and in the substantial body of survivor and perpetrator testimony produced over the postwar period.
The record establishes the operational character of the installation during the wartime period, the operational scale of the killings, the identities of the principal perpetrators, the operational technologies that were deployed, and the consequences of the installation for the surviving Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner populations. The aggregate record stands as the primary source for the academic understanding of the camp in the wider context of the wartime killing programme.
See also
- Richard Dimbleby Bergen-Belsen Broadcast 1945
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
- Holocaust Memorial Day
- The Displaced Persons Crisis
Sources
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Yale University Press, 1996
- Geoffrey P. Megargee and Martin Dean, eds, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933 to 1945, multi-volume, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, 2009 onwards
- Israel Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, Indiana University Press, 1994